Today Tomorrow and Yesterday

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Today Tomorrow and Yesterday
Lyrics by Randy McQuilkin
Music by Jerry Boutot and Mike Young

The space between the planets
seems to far for us to fly
While the spaces between people
are too many to deny
The walls we build around us
hides the light that shines within
But the sun rising every day
shows us where to begin

Time and space are relative
At least that’s what they often say
How often we lose tomorrow
Living in yesterday

Life is like a spiral
That’s why our path unwinds
Faith provides the courage
To fight the fear that often blinds
Passion the great deceiver
Wisdon the simple receiver
Emotion the grand weaver
Touching all of us here

Time and space are relative
At least that’s what they often say
How often we lose tomorrow
Living in yesterday

Passion can rise like a fire
Emotion can fly like a kite
But they both can become a millstone
Dragging us deep into the night
Love must be nurtured
Rage must be put to rest
We all must find a balance in life
If we want to pass life’s test

Time and space are relative
At least that’s what they often say
How often we lose tomorrow
Living in yesterday

Today Tomorrow and Yesterday Videos:

Today Tomorrow and Yesterday Lyrics

Today Tomorrow and Yesterday – Notes:

While we were working on the original 4-track recordings for Dark Waters, Randy and our friend Mike Young were up late one night and they wrote the bones of this song together. The next day, Randy came to me and told me he had a new song to add to the album. We needed more material and were short a song anyway, so I agreed to listen to it. I loved it. It was perfect, and I set about the task of “fleshing it out” with a nice arrangement, some great analog synth strings, and a couple of tasty lead solos. It ended up being just long enough so we did not exceed the 45 minute limit.

Wait… 45 minute limit? What is that? Well, you have to be from the days of Vinyl records and Cassette tapes to know what that means. A 90 minute Cassette tape has two 45 minute sides. So in order to put an entire album on one side of the tape, you needed to make sure the album was under 45 minutes. For a 45 minute cassette, you needed to have two clean sides of 22.5 minutes each. So not only did you have to write the songs, in some cases back then you had to change them so they would fit. The Vinyl albums ALWAYS fit either on one side of a 90 minute tape, or one side each on a 45 minute tape. 99.999% of the time this was true back then. The industry knew that the album sides had to be 22.5 minutes or less. Songs were written and arranged that way.

Today, we have no discipline like that at all unless you are writing specifically to put the record on vinyl. You have CD’s that hold 80 minutes worth of music, which is almost a double album from the vinyl days. Most albums are around an hour long now. With the popularity of streaming music and selective listening, it doesn’t matter at all how long an album is if you are only selling it digitally.

So back to Today Tomorrow and Yesterday, the song was crafted to last just long enough to fill in the empty minutes of the record. To create the “side 1″ and “side 2″ song groupings, we captured the length of each song and then moved them around so they fit into the 22.5 minutes per side model.

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